So you have a school garden...now what to do with that food? The Master Food Preserver episode! (in English)

00:00:05 Michelle

Welcome to the farm to school podcast where you will hear stories of how youth thrive and farmers prosper when we learn how to grow, cook and eat delicious, nutritious local foods and schools across the country.

00:00:16 Rick

And the world. We're your hosts. Hi, everybody. I'm Rick Sherman.

00:00:19 Michelle

and I'm Michelle Markesteyn, and we are so excited to have Jared in the studio.

00:00:23 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

Hey, glad to be here.

00:00:24 Michelle

Hey, Jared. I just learned that you were a DJ in college!

00:00:29 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

I was, yeah. I had a great time. I had a variety show in the morning at 8:00 AM in Grinnell, IA, where I went to Grinnell College, and I got on with my roommate and James and we would play old indie rock hits from like the late 90s, a lot of pavement built to spill, bands like that Modest Mouse. And we tried. Yeah, yeah. And tried to tell bad jokes when no one was, no one was listening.

00:00:36 Michelle

OK.

00:00:52 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

So we had the studio to ourselves. Yeah, it was very fun.

00:00:54 Michelle

That sounds like super fun, and I'm just wondering if you could more fully introduce yourself.

00:01:01 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

Yeah, yeah, of course. So I'm Jared Hibbard, Swanson and I work for the Oregon State University Extension Service. Big title, Food security and safety program manager for family and Community Health, which really means that I get to manage a few programs around food preservation, around food access, especially culturally relevant food access.

00:01:01 Michelle

Farm to school greatest hits. Whoop, whoop.

00:01:21 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

Trying to get folks the tools they need to enjoy important food, healthy food, nutritious food around and I can.. greatest hits, yeah. So I never thought I would end up in this field. Never ever. When I was a kid, I didn't garden. I didn't preserve, no one in my in my immediate family living in Dallas, TX did either. It was kind of a suburban childhood and you know, dirt was really a dirty word, truly a dirty word. Farming was a dirty word to me. I had all the negative stereotype that people have around that I deeply held on to those and I so you know, like what changed. So this is this is one of my greatest hit stories about this about my conversion to become a true like dyed in the wool advocate for people growing their own food and preserving their own food and I have to credit my wife so I was in Graduate School and living in Pennsylvania. And had never grown a thing in my life. Maybe I'd planted a bean in like third grade science and watched it sprout, but I had no interest in that. And my wife, she'd done a little gardening. Her dad was into it and she said, why don't we buy a jalapeno plant to grow on our balcony? And I thought that was a ridiculous idea because jalapenos are like, you know, $0.05 for a handful at the grocery store. And you eat so few of them. Like, it's not even really a big source of calories. We don't eat a ton of spicy food in our diet. But she bought it, and then it ended up on her balcony in this little blue pot. And I was working on my dissertation in philosophy, so I spent a lot of time at the computer next to that balcony, and I could watch it every day. And I noticed that it wasn't really getting watered enough, and it was starting to suffer. So I took it on myself to start watering it. Right because I didn't want to see this thing suffering this thing on the deck that might die even if I thought it was a dumb idea to grow a jalapeno. There was a living thing out there that needed some TLC, so I started watering it right. And you know, June goes by and I'm realizing, well, I'm kind of the main one watering this jalapeno plant and it kind of feels like my thing now. So I'm like, well, begrudging still a little bit. But, you know, I own it, I start watering it, caring for it and then around late July, early August, we go on vacation. And I'm really worried about the plant and we have a house sitter coming over and I ask the house sitter, you gotta make sure to water the plant. Oh, yeah, and feed the cats and scoop the litter and check the mail that. But you really got to water the jalapeno plant and a week later I come back and you can predict what happened. He didn't water the jalapeno plant and it was, you know, drought stricken, the leaves were all withering, but somehow it had eked out these little tiny Peppers. These little tiny like 1 centimeter long or less, jalapeno peppers and we went out and we picked all of those Peppers and we made a little salsa. And I have to say that was the greatest salsa I've ever had in my entire life because I grew those. And so I was. I was sold at that moment on because I realized what was missing from that part of my life was taking care of something else. And this sort of, like, daily ritualistic way, where it was like, OK, I'm focused on my computer work. I'm focused on writing this dissertation. But actually, the thing that's bringing me fulfillment and happiness is that there's this other thing out there that needs my care. And so gardening for me. That's how I got into it.

00:04:40 Rick

Wow, one plant did that. Isn't that amazing.. I've never heard a story like that?

00:04:42 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

Yeah. Well, and I got addicted. So how that's how. How did I change from philosophy, you know, I taught philosophy for a few years, taught environmental ethics. How I ended up moving out here. But I really loved gardening. And I started volunteering in a school garden, actually. Hammond Elementary in North Salem. A friend persuaded me to do it, and that became again, like, you know, gardening therapy for me. I got out a couple of times a week. I got to play with kids in the dirt. We would shovel compost. We would go watch the bees and pick flowers and taste things. And I loved that. And I realized I loved that more than I loved sitting at my desk at, you know, when I'm at university, trying to come up with things to write journal articles on. And so I just made a big switch, right? I just changed, I did an AmeriCorps position with the Red Cross doing school garden work. And then I got a job with the Marion Polk Food chair. We can talk more about that. Yeah, but my career was off right into farm to school and school gardening. And now, food security work.

00:05:38 Rick

OK that that's a good segue way into that. That's where I first met you. You are working for Marion Polk Food Share, could you describe what that operation was all about?

00:05:49 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

Yeah. So the Mary Polk Food chair is the regional food bank and the mid-Willamette Valley serving Marion and Polk Counties, Salem area and Woodburn Silverton. And they had a large community garden network at that time and that's why I was volunteering within that network, doing school garden stuff. And I had this idea. I remember I was again to tell a little bit of a story. I went on a backpacking trip with a friend up to Maxwell Butte, near Mount Jefferson here in Oregon. And he was he was also a school garden volunteer. And we are having these as you have sometimes on these like wilderness expeditions, you have these revelations about your life and what's meaningful. And he was asking me, you know, I was in the midst of this transition and he's like, what is it that you really want to do? And I thought, well, I have this idea that there are other youth who are living in the city who don't know that fulfilling experience of taking care of plants and of growing food, and how like sustaining and fulfilling that can be. And I bet if we get together, we could get a group of kids and we could really grow some serious food, not just a little bit of these little thumbnail sized jalapeno Peppers. We could have a farm and we could actually produce a lot of food and it would be meaningful for those kids and we could give that food out for free in the community and it would be meaningful for the people who get it. So this was just this idea. And there are other places that didn't come up with this. It was the first person to have this idea. There's the food project in Boston, had it, you know, 30-40 years before I did. And there are lots of programs in Oregon, too, but I wasn't aware of those and. And he thought he was like, that's a cool idea. You should talk to Ian at the food chair. Ian Dixon McDonald, who's still there at the Marion Folk food chair, and he was a big supporter and believer in that idea and helped bring it to fruition and helped me to happen. So yeah, that became my role of the food chair as I pitched this idea while I was doing school garden work of like, hey, let's do it with older kids, high school students. Let's do it as a summer program. They get a stipend. We they get to learn how to grow food, they to learn about agriculture, and they're doing community service right there. That food is going to go out into the community for free in different ways to folks who are experiencing food insecurity. So yeah, we launched that at the Oregon School for the Deaf. They lent us at least to us, an acre, 2 acres of land, something pretty small. And we did a CSA off of that and distributions into food pantries too, for a couple of years. Then we partnered with Chemeketa Community College to start our six acre farm. It's still there. It's much larger operation. They do about 120 CSA shares. So household box of produce every week for like a 14 to 16 week growing. And so that program still going strong, 20 to 30 youth, every teenagers every year are participating in it. So super fun program really, really proud to help start that and love doing it was just a ton of fun. But at the end of 10 years, I realized, like I had given to it what I could give to it. And it was time for some new energy and new enthusiasm, new ideas into it and new opportunities where we're calling me. So I stepped away from that about two years ago.

00:08:50 Rick

Thank you for that journey through the wayback machine! That was really good. And so now you're at Oregon State University and you have this big title and one of the things you do is master food preserver. You were mentioning that I always look at it like a school garden is great. Once people, they grow crops and they want to kind of take the next step like we talked about raising chickens. You know, like that could be a next step or what do we do with all this food if we have an overabundance of it and it and it might spoil. So I always think it's a really good idea to, like, hey, talk about canning it in a safe way to do that. And I think that' where master food preserver can come in now for those of you in the other parts of the country, you've probably heard of Master gardener, but master food preserver doesn't get a lot of press. Probably right.

00:09:46 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

Yeah, it's not as well known. It's not as well established. Not every state has a master food preserver program. We're pretty fortunate in Oregon to have a flourishing master food Preserver program interest has, you know, ebbed and flowed over the years in Canning. I think. Currently we're in kind of a flow where it's increasing interest in it right now, but it is similar to Master Gardeners, right? It's a volunteer program where folks can take a certification course to become non credit sort of experts in in the field of food preservation. And they can give back volunteer hours to educate others in the community about it as extension volunteers. So we have we have a couple 100 master food preservers, mainly on the West side of the state here in Oregon that are out there doing workshops answering our food preservation hotline. If you have a canning question or freezing question or a pickling question. Those are the folks to call. I don't have the number memorized. I should have brought that written that down in my notes. I don't have that one, but… yeah.

00:10:44 Michelle

Rick puts everything in our show notes.

00:10:46 Rick

Yes, we will. Yeah, we will.

00:10:46 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

Yeah, great. Well, drop that in the show notes. Yeah, the food preservation hotline is is live right now. OK, so they're out there to educate people about safe ways to preserve food. You know, sort of dual goal, increased food security. Exactly. The problem that you're speaking to if people have an abundance of stuff, their garden from their CSA share, maybe they went out with the gleaners and they got a bunch of Logan queries or something and they need to know what to do with Master Food Preservers can give them some ideas and then secondly is the safety side of it. Because this is big the safety side of it is big.

00:11:15 Rick

I'm glad you said that because things can go sideways and with a master food preserver program they can teach you to do it at home safely. And I think a lot of people are like, ohh this is... science is too much for me. I could never do it just like they say. I could never be a Master Gardener and it's… Really I always feel it's not that hard, but it's a good environment to learn that stuff to see if you're into it. What do you think about it?

00:11:45 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

Yeah, absolutely. I mean again, I'll go into story mode for a second. So yeah, how I got into Canning initially was we had some friends that asked us to house it and they had a big strawberry patch in the backyard.

00:11:48 Rick

Sure.

00:11:58 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

And they left in June and they went on vacation and we were the beneficiaries of this huge harvest of strawberries. And we ate as much as we could within a few days of picking them. But pretty quickly, it became apparent that we weren't going to eat them all before they spoiled. And again, credit to my partner Skye. She was like, yeah, I think you can. Candies and jam. And I was like, that's the thing that only really smart people can do who have a lot of equipment. And she was like, I think, pretty sure you can do that at home. And we googled it and found extension resources. This is back at Penn State. We were living in Pennsylvania then. And they had great guides on how to make your own jam safely. And jam is like the entryway into canning, where it's low risk. It's very easy, it's super tasty. And in the summer time, you get a lot of berries. That's the go to product. So yeah, we made strawberry jam and we canned it using some recipes from Penn State Extension. And it was delicious, and it made great gifts. And from there I did more reading because we had a garden at that point with tomatoes and Peppers. And I was like, let's add some salt. Then I read about Botulism and I was like oh, let's read a little more before we can salsa, because when you get into low acid foods like vegetables and tomatoes are kind of a borderline acidic food. You do have this risk of this fatal poisoning that can happen if the food is not canned properly, and it's rare, but fatal is Fatal.

00:13:07 Rick

Yeah.

00:13:22 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

We were very careful. Obviously when we started canning. But I learned I didn't have a teacher other than extension publications, extension bulletins, which were really well. We're a thorough guide to how to do it, and that's again, those are the foundation of the master Food Preserver program. It's the same research based information that guarantees the safety of the product. Fortunately, preservation isn't just canning, right. There's traditional pickling, you know, with salts to do lacto-fermentation, there's drying and dehydrating. There's smoking and curing, there's freezing. There's all sorts of techniques you can do. Each of them has their own food safety concerns. Cannon gets the gets the big headline because of the Botulism concern. Sure. And I think it's right that we emphasize the fact that if you're going to go into the world of.. you really do need to have some research based recipes to rely on and a little bit of reading up and training will go a long ways.

00:14:16 Rick

Yeah, I know a lot of people come into this garden world, a lot of school garden coordinators and say we want to can food and I'm like.. great, this is a good resource and I point them that direction. But a lot of them want to say, oh, we want to like, bring our stuff to a farmers market and sell it. I'm like, well, that's a whole different ball of wax because that anything that's fresh vegetables or one thing you could do, you could sell pretty easily. But anything with protein or canned or shellfish or it's all a USDA thing…

00:14:39 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

Yeah, it is. And it's not just even sold, it's even donated, right? So the Oregon Food Bank and its subsidiaries won't accept home canned foods because there's no way for them to vet. And that product to make sure it's going to be safe. So if you're if you're running stuff without a license without being inspected by the Department of Agriculture. You're talking about doing it for yourself or as gifts for your friends and family who trust you, right. And so you might take a take a hard look at who's giving you the canned foods and ask them where did you get that recipe? Did you did you use an extension site? Did you use the ball cookbook which they use research recipes, the USDA. There's lots of great sources, but you're right that selling it gets into a regulatory field that probably most people aren't prepared for cuz you have to have a license to do it.

00:15:38 Rick

Well, Jared, I trust you and I consider you a friend, so. You can you can give me stuff.. and Michelle.

00:15:46 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

Stocking stuffers are on the way. Yeah, they're coming your way.

00:15:48 Rick

Thank you. Alright.

00:15:50 Michelle

So thinking of like entry into food preservation, what's your sense of school gardens or doing food preservation?

00:15:59 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

Yeah. So like I was saying a second ago, there are lots of ways to get into food preservation and we don't have to jump to pressure canning, which is the most technical and the most risky. And a lot of times, folks go to that. But preservation can start really simply with giving students in the school garden the tools they need to process something for freezing at home, for example, or doing a pickling experiment. So these are things that when I was working at the youth farm and we had teens with us all summer and we had access to a large kitchen right out of the farm. It was kind of an ideal setup that not everybody has, But we would experiment with some of those simpler processes, so we would teach the kids about how to make sauerkraut or how to make dill Pickles straight from the produce straight from the fields, which doesn't take a lot of high tech equipment. You can have a few jars or Crocs, or even just a pot and a dinner plate, and you can have it a safe way to make sauerkraut or dill Pickles. Again, you know, looking online to find a good recipe that you trust is helpful, but that's such a safe product where you're using the natural bacteria that are floating around in our environment that are already on the surface of the vegetable. You're creating a little home for them with a lot of salt. That's going to exclude some of the bad bacteria and then they produce their own. The bacteria produce their own acid that keeps the food preserved and safe long term. So really, really easy to do. And it's a really fun science experiment. So we used to do that sometimes at the at the youth farm, and we did get into jam making, which again is not something that you would sell or donate. But the kids were able to, if they have to make it. They could take it home and try it in their in their household. So we would grow. We grew Yost to berries. Was one type of Berry we grew and we had access to like Peaches and some other fruit and some blueberries. So we would do some jam with the yoster berries primarily every year, which is a weird gooseberry-current cross.

00:17:51 Rick

We're so lucky in the Pacific Northwest, we're the very capital of the world. Sorry. Rest of the country.

00:17:57 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

Yeah.

00:17:58 Rick

But not sorry. I mean.. yeah, we have so much of abundance of berries up here. Yeah.

00:18:03 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

We do, right? So Jam was an easy one for us. And so we taught the kids how to make jam and how to can that cause. Again, that's it's a high acid food jam also has a ton of sugar in it, which acts as a preservative. So we were we weren't concerned at all about the food safety of that product. It was a good chance to teach the kids like, this is what boiling water canning, it looks like and make it really accessible.

00:18:13 Rick

Yeah.

00:18:23 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

So food preservation could start with simpler methods, and then as the kids have the knowledge and the skill and the maturity to engage in more advanced techniques and then you can explore those.

00:18:34 Rick

I will say I learn canning from my mom. And she grew up in the depression, and she was so old-school about she would do jam and she would just throw some wax on top of the thing and call it good. You know, the top of the jar and it was always kind of funky when you open. No, it there's always be some mold on there and like she just scraped that off. Sorry mom.

00:18:52 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

Not recommended. That's the problem, yeah.

00:18:58 Michelle

Yeah, mold keeps it from rotting. That's what I heard.

00:18:59 Rick

Ohh, but she was like that's how my mom taught me and you know, but whatever. Yeah, I'm glad we've come a long way.

00:19:07 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

Well, I mean, it's a great if I comment on that real quick, there's a food preservation is a tradition, right? The different families have different methods they use. And when we're teaching food preservation science based food preservation, we have to be mindful of that, that people come to it with different backgrounds and if you if you if you lead with this message that your grandma was trying to kill you all. Well, guess what. People aren't going to listen to you. They think they're insulting my grandma. You're going to walk out? So it's good to listen to what people know about it already. What practices they've engaged in, and then present some of the new information that we have. Well, actually, we found out recently that that mold that's growing on the GM actually can have some carcinogens in it and can really be toxic to you over long term exposure. So we don't recommend that type oof thing anymore because it can't be harmful to your health and that's new information that your grandma didn't have, right?

00:19:57 Rick

Thank you. That's yeah. That puts my mind at ease. Thank you for that. Yeah.

00:20:00 Michelle

We always we always do the best we can with the information we have, right? I mean give people the benefit of the doubt.

00:20:03 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

Exactly, yeah.

00:20:07 Michelle

And well, just to that point, like you were talking about, and you just kind of touched on it, but you know more culturally relevant food preservation, right? Can you kind of unpack that concept a little more?

00:20:17 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

Yeah. So like I'm, I'll start with myself. I mentioned earlier, I didn't grow up canning or gardening. My mom grew up on a farm in Kansas where they grew most of the food they ate. So she definitely canned. And that's the tradition of preservation that that I, you know, would have naturally been ushered into if my mom hadn't moved to the city and didn't have a garden. And I see that with a lot of students that I work with now who are from, quote, UN quote, the dominant culture, right? They're white middle income. They talk about like, well, I have a family past of people canning and growing their own food. And that's why I think when they think food preservation, they jump immediately to canning. When I was at the youth farm we had, you know, students from a much more diverse set of backgrounds. And Canning wasn't a part of their culture, right? Folks who were coming from families coming from Vietnam or Uganda or El Salvador, which are not places where Canning home canning is done almost at all. But does that mean that people are only eating fresh food all the time? They're getting no, of course, not. Every culture has found ways to take their harvest to store it so they can enjoy certain important foods year round, like the berries into jam is, you know, the example you gave for the northwest. So some of those, those practices could be salting, drying or fermenting like kimchi is a great example. Cultural example dried Peppers is a common example. When I would talk to some of our students from the Central American background, right? Well, I guess my family does or did. And you know when they lived in El Salvador in Mexico, they did dry a lot of things. Sangai. Yeah. Which is hard in the northwest, right, because we have such a humid, wet climate. Yeah, it's hard to. It's hard to execute a good sun dry. But other folks from other parts of the world do it routinely. That's their main method of food preservation.

00:21:48 Rick

Sun dried.. Yes.

00:22:01 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

So being curious about the background of the students you're working with goes a long way is to ask them what they already know from their families. So and we do that with adults as well. When we teach food preservation, you start with asking what do you already know what's important to you? What do you eat at home? And then you can build a little community of people who are into good food.

00:22:23 Rick

Yeah, there's that's a good lesson to learn in that like I do sun dried tomatoes. But I use my I cheat and I do my food dehydrator and call it sun dried, but it's really dehydrated tomatoes. But like you said, it's I don't feel right about leaving it out in the sun with the birds and stuff. Yeah, I just, you know, I don't do that.

00:22:42 Michelle

So what do you think it will take to expand food preservation in the school garden world? And is it even.. Maybe that's not even the right question. Maybe it's not even something we want to do?

00:22:55 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

Yeah. So I maybe a different way to frame that is so the way you framed it there is like we have this thing, this cool thing, food preservation and we're trying to be advocates to get more people to do it. Which I don't think is the approach that I take to it right? I if people are interested in food preservation, I want to make sure they have the resources to do it safely, right? But maybe the maybe a different question is what is it going to take to get food from the garden into households, or to have that food available year round for students who want it, and that takes a set of techniques, right? So I remember when I was working in school gardens in elementary school gardens that some of the most memorable moments we had were when we harvested something and we prepared it right where it wasn't just about gardening. Then it was about eating because gardening is great, taking care of plants. As I said earlier, I love it. I think it's very fulfilling. But gardening for vegetables and for fruits means they're plants. You get to take care of, and then you get to eat them, and that's super fun. So I remember we we grew a sweet potato plant at the ham in school garden one year, which is longing to do in the northwest. But we had this huge sweet potato vine. And when the kids came back to school in September, we pulled it. And there were these giant yam sweet potatoes on the bottom of that thing. And we, you know, peeled it and we dice it up. And we had a little butane burner and a wok and we put olive oil and salt in, and we made little, you know, sweet potato fries kind of in the moment. And the kids loved it. It was like their favorite day in the garden. And so I think about how much more enjoyment and connection that kids can have to gardening, if we give them tools to cook it and then also to preserve it and take it home.

00:24:33 Michelle

Well, Jared, thank you so much for joining us. And I think you just made this podcast one of our greatest hits.

00:24:43 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

Thank you!

00:24:44 Michelle

You thank you. Farm to school was written, directed and produced by Rick Sherman and Michelle Markesteyn with production support from Leanne Locker of Oregon State University. The Farm to School podcast was made possible by a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture.

00:24:57 Rick

The content and ideas on the Farm to School Podcast does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Oregon State University, Oregon Department of Education and the United States Department of Agriculture. The USDA, Oregon Department of Education and Oregon State University are equal opportunity providers and employers.

00:25:15 Michelle

Do you want to learn more about Farm to school by searching Farm to school podcast?

00:25:24 Rick

We would love to hear from you. Stop by that website Michelle just mentioned to say hello, or give an idea for a future podcast.

00:25:31 Michelle

Great. Thanks. Thanks, Jared. We really appreciate you making the time. Bye everyone.

00:25:32 Rick

See you next time!.

00:25:32 Jared Hibbard-Swanson

Thanks for having me.